What pattern to follow when you realloc memory? There are different approaches, and the choice should be made according to the nature of your application, different application would show different expected pattern of memory usage, and thus you should have different solutions. There is no single solution/pattern that fits all situations.

In my original post, I never said it is the only pattern, that you should realloc by adding one fixed-size block each time, that is just one possible pattern, and it is just one example.

Your choice also largely depends on your strategy to trade off between speed and memory usage. If one cares speed so much, and does not care memory that much, he can just double memory size each time, as what Perl did for its hash. Again, this is just another example, not the only approach.

I looked at your c/c++ example, and believe there is a big chance that your for loop was optimized by the compiler. In that case, it does not demo the real performance of realloc.